“The Gentleman from Indianapolis” Kurt Vonnegut, 1922-2007
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“The Gentleman from Indianapolis” Kurt Vonnegut, 1922-2007 GREGORY SUMNER Henry David Thoreau said, “I have traveled extensively in Concord.” . [W]hat he said about Concord is what every child feels, what every child seemingly must feel, about the place where he or she was born. There is surely more than enough to marvel at for a lifetime, no matter where the child is born. Castles? Indianapolis was full of them. n his 1981 “autobiographical collage,” Palm Sunday, Kurt Vonnegut Irecounted the frustration he experienced trying to convince the Indianapolis Star to run an obituary for another city-native-made-good, Janet Flanner. For decades, Flanner had been Paris correspondent for The New Yorker, and, like Vonnegut, she was a member of the presti- gious American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters. In Vonnegut’s estimation, Flanner was “the most deft and charming literary stylist Indianapolis has so far produced, and the one who came closest __________________________ Gregory Sumner is professor of American history at the University of Detroit Mercy. He is the author of Dwight Macdonald and the Politics Circle: The Challenge of Cosmopolitan Democracy (1996). An Indianapolis native, he is currently writing an intellectual biography of Kurt Vonnegut. INDIANA MAGAZINE OF HISTORY, 103 (September 2007) ᭧ 2007, Trustees of Indiana University. KURT VONNEGUT 303 Kurt Vonnegut, c. 1984 Courtesy Butler University 304 INDIANA MAGAZINE OF HISTORY to being a planetary citizen, too.” Despite these achievements, no one he spoke to over the phone at the Star’s city room had ever heard of her. Vonnegut was able at last to overcome their disinterest when he men- tioned that she was related to the family who ran a prominent chain of local funeral homes. From this he concluded that his “legacy,” too, was secure—that, when the time came, he would have no problem getting an appropriate obituary in an Indianapolis paper, “because I am related to people who used to own a chain of hardware stores.”1 The cultural provincialism Kurt Vonnegut decried and often paro- died still exists in Indianapolis, but, judging from how the city respond- ed to his death this past April, he need not have worried that his life and career would be reduced to his connections to the (still fondly remem- bered) Vonnegut Hardware chain. The city had already embarked in 2007 on “The Year of Kurt Vonnegut,” an ambitious program of commu- nity activities and events honoring his “Indianapolis heritage and liter- ary contributions to the world.” Among the highlights were mayoral proclamations, a “one city-one book” library promotion of his 1969 antiwar masterpiece, Slaughterhouse-Five, exhibitions of his silkscreens (a passion in his later years), and a McFadden Lecture at Butler University, which took place, as it turned out, two weeks after his death. Mark Vonnegut delivered his father’s last speech to a packed audience at Clowes Hall on April 27. The next day, fellow Indianapolis literary alum Dan Wakefield, speaking at the Indianapolis Museum of Art, offered an emotional testament to the generosity of his friend and mentor. The memorial lovefest was sincere and widespread, and represented the last phase of a rapprochement of sorts between Kurt Vonnegut and his native city which had been in the works for some time. Vonnegut left Indiana for good more than six decades ago. In 1940, after graduation from Shortridge High School, he embarked on a short career as a chemistry student at Cornell University, then served as a sol- dier in the Second World War. After the war, he studied anthropology at the University of Chicago, then worked in public relations for General Electric in Schenectady, New York. He labored as a writer in the 1950s and 1960s, struggling to support his family on Cape Cod. And, since 1970, he lived as an iconic presence on the East Side of Manhattan, pro- ducing books for a global audience. Through it all, Vonnegut wore his __________________________ 1Kurt Vonnegut, Palm Sunday: An Autobiographical Collage (New York, 1981), 53, 60-61. KURT VONNEGUT 305 Hoosier identity on his sleeve. He incorporated it into his work, and often discussed his complex relationship to the land of his formative years. He was perhaps too humble to claim the mantle he admired, once worn by Booth Tarkington—“The Gentleman from Indianapolis.” But it is clear that, for our time, he deserves that encomium. Indianapolis—“the only human settlement in all of history whose location was determined by a pen and a straightedge,” he once told John Updike— was of course the site of profound pain as well as joy growing up. Kurt Vonnegut Jr. was born into the fourth generation of a spectacu- larly prosperous German American extended family of farmers, mer- chants, and artisans that first arrived in Indianapolis in the years before the Civil War. As his Uncle John Rauch observed in the family history that occupies the first section of Palm Sunday: The immigrants had been literally starved—materially and socially—in the Nineteenth Century of Western Europe. When they came here and found the rich table of the Midwest, they gorged themselves. And who can blame them? In the process they created an Empire by the hardest work and exercise of their inherent and varied talents. These “guilt-free” people of the German tide, Vonnegut wrote, had not been involved in “the genocides and ethnic cleansing which had made this for them a virgin continent.” Upon arrival, they built successful net- works of businesses and social clubs throughout the Midwest, notably in cities like Milwaukee, Chicago, Detroit, and Cincinnati. In Indianapolis, on the paternal side of the family, the empire included a burgeoning dry- goods business which later became Vonnegut Hardware. Its success made the Vonneguts aristocratic leaders of their community and allowed the men to pursue professions. Kurt’s grandfather, Bernard, and father, Kurt Sr., were licensed architects, responsible for many of the architec- tural gems of Indianapolis, including Das Deutsche Haus, the L. S. Ayres department store (and its legendary clock), the William H. Block build- ing, the Lyric Theatre, and the Bell Telephone downtown headquarters. Kurt’s mother, Edith, despite a traumatic childhood, was similarly the beneficiary of the Lieber Brewery fortune, which afforded her an elite education, grand tours of European churches, museums, and castles, and high expectations for the future. Kurt and Edith’s wedding party at 306 INDIANA MAGAZINE OF HISTORY the Claypool Hotel in 1913 was an extravagant celebration, both in cost and scale, an event “long remembered in Indianapolis,” according to Uncle John. “The next year,” however, “came the First World War and then prohibition. The curtain fell on a glorious scene—never to be wit- nessed again.” The xenophobic furies unleashed by the war effectively “lobotomized” the German American community in Indianapolis, in Kurt Vonnegut’s words. Das Deutsche Haus, splashed by vandals with yellow paint, became the Atheneum. Kurt and Edith grew so afflicted with Weltshmerz for their lost prewar world that they were unable or unwilling to pass along much German language, music, or culture to their youngest son, Kurt Jr., who arrived in 1922. “They volunteered to make me ignorant and rootless as proof of their patriotism,” Vonnegut recalled ruefully. His parents separated him so thoroughly from his ancestral past, he wrote, that the German soldiers who captured him at the Battle of the Bulge in 1944, far from being brothers, “might as well have been Bolivians or Tibetans for all they meant to me.”2 By the time of the Great Depression, the Vonneguts’ financial for- tunes also went into steep decline. There were no missed meals at their elegant home on North Illinois Street, but Kurt Sr. could not find a com- mission for a decade and a half after the stock market crash of 1929. The family found itself juggling creditors (enduring a growing, humiliating reputation as “charge-account deadbeats”) and sinking on capital made of quicksand. The stress of these losses no doubt contributed to Edith’s suicide on Mother’s Day weekend 1944, with her youngest son visiting home while training to go overseas at Camp Atterbury. It also “gutted” the spirit of Kurt Sr., who, after the war, became a recluse, eventually living out his life in solitude as a potter in Brown County until his death in 1957.3 As a youngster, Kurt Jr. felt these blows profoundly. He always described himself, first and foremost, as a child of the Great Depression, with all the desperate insecurity and fatalism that the phrase implies. To be sure, his parents, despite their difficulties, did provide a nurturing __________________________ 2Vonnegut, Fates Worse Than Death: An Autobiographical Collage (New York 1991), 93; Palm Sunday, 41, 46-48, 20-21, 78-79; A Man Without a Country (New York, 2005), 52. For a darker view of nineteenth-century “empire-building” in the Midwest, where “a handful of rapacious citizens come to control all that [is] worth controlling” in “Rosewater County, Indiana,” see Vonnegut, God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater (New York, 1965), 8-12. 3Vonnegut, Fates Worse Than Death, 23; Palm Sunday, 143, 48-52. KURT VONNEGUT 307 home in many respects. Even amid the world of “empty graces and aggressively useless possessions” whose passing they mourned, the house was full of books, magazines, and art, and they inoculated their children against what they saw as the twin poisons of organized religion and racism. As to the former, Kurt inherited the ancestral creed of free- thinking skepticism, although he often termed himself a “Christ-wor- shipping agnostic,” referring to the Christ of the Sermon on the Mount. As to the latter, Indianapolis, Vonnegut remembered, was as divided by Jim Crow segregation during his childhood as any southern city.